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2010-10-24

Apple's Restricted APT

There's been a lot of talk in tech news about Apple's new Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" and the new Mac App Store with one-click installation, updating, and removal.
When I saw this, I was going to post this right away, but a lot of other writers beat me to it. This article (Ryan Tate, Gawker) sums it up nicely. Basically, Debian, Red Hat, and SUSE have had these features all along. I think one way to make Linux more appealing then is to brand them in ways similar to Apple's or Android's branding; it just seems more hip now, even if it made sense the whole time.
Then again, the Mac App Store will be restricted in much the same way that the iOS App Store is. To this, I say that this is what I suspected all along. I figured Apple would go down this road thanks to its extremely loyal fanbase. In short, I told you so! (I've said this to people in person, though I haven't written anything about this on this blog.)

2 comments:

I came here for the Mint article. But you do realise that Microsoft will be shipping Windows 8 with an "appstore" right? And it'll be restricted and such in a similar way to Apples right? I'm also sure the Ubuntu appstore (if it isn't just an extension of apt) will also have restrictions on what goes in to it.

So the whole mass of tweets, blog posts and general moaning can be summed up as:

OEM's appstores not as open as Debian's apt repositories, restrictions apply to all submissions.

@Van': I'm not expressing surprise that Apple's Mac App Store is a closed system; this is in fact what I had figured for a while now. I'm also not surprised about Microsoft Windows 8 having a similarly *closed* app store. (What I am surprised about is that Ubuntu's app store (which I don't think is just an extension of APT) is going to have restrictions and app reviews, given all the talk (though it may just be that - talk) about Ubuntu's commitment to freedom.) All I'm saying is that if it was to happen, it was going to happen like this anyway. (By the way, did you read the Mint review?) Thanks for the comment!